Series Preview: Kentucky at No. 9 Vanderbilt
After a long season of SEC play, the final weekend of the regular season has arrived. No. 9 Vanderbilt will close its regular season against Kentucky in Nashville.
Both teams are coming off crucial series victories. Vanderbilt took down its arch rival Tennessee in Knoxville two of the three games and Kentucky got a home sweep over a ranked Oklahoma team.
The series wins for both teams helped them climb the SEC standings and create more chaos in the standings. For Vanderbilt, the series victory last weekend helped them catapult up to the No. 4 seed for the SEC Tournament, enough for a double-bye. For Kentucky, the sweep over the Sooners moved them into a three-way tie with Florida and Oklahoma for tenth in the conference, which the Wildcats currently own the tiebreaker.
Heading into the final series of the regular season holds more than just SEC Tournament seeding stakes for both teams, this series also has stakes in NCAA Tournament seeding.
In the latest bracketology projection from D1baseball.com, Vanderbilt now holds the fifth overall seed in the NCAA Tournament projection, hosting a regional in Nashville alongside Louisville, East Tennessee State and Tennessee Tech. Kentucky moved up to a projected 2-seed in the Corvallis Regional with Oregon State as the host team.
With the top eight teams in the NCAA Tournament getting the opportunity to host the Super Regional Round, the Commodores get their opportunity this weekend to move one step closer to cementing a Top-8 spot and potentially host the first two rounds of the NCAA Tournament.
But it will not be easy. Kentucky gets a chance to play spoiler against Vanderbilt and secure their spot in the NCAA Tournament. One reason it will not be easy: weather. After going through rain delays at Tennessee over the weekend, the current forecast shows potential for severe thunderstorms in Nashville Friday with a 90% chance of rain at night.
Vanderbilt’s offense has started to click at the right time. The Commodores have scored seven or more runs in four of the last seven games, and scored four or more in five of the last seven games.
Another storyline going into this series is the future of Kentucky head coach Nick Minigione. After Mississippi State fired head coach Chris Lemonis on April 28, Minigione was named as a possible candidate to replace Lemonis at the helm in Starkville. Minigione was an assistant coach at Mississippi State from 2009-2016.
Vanderbilt and Kentucky started their three-game series Thursday at 6 p.m. CT on ESPN+.
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Graham Baakko is a writer for Vanderbilt Commodores On SI, primarily covering football, basketball and baseball. Graham is a recent graduate from the University of Alabama, where he wrote for The Crimson White, WVUA-FM, WVUA 23 as he covered a variety of Crimson Tide sports. He also covered South Carolina athletics as a sportswriting intern for GamecockCentral.